Tammy Bakker Gives Marriage Hints in Book

The key to a successful marriage, according to Tammy Faye Bakker, is to “keep it exciting.” Toward that end, “I like to be different people for my husband. I wear different wigs all the time. Jim never knows if I’m going to be a redhead, a blond or a brunet. I like to keep him guessing.”

The wife of the deposed head of the PTL television ministry also makes sure that she always wears makeup for her husband, even in bed. “Jim has very seldom seen me without makeup and hardly ever in my life without my eyelashes. I think every woman ought to wear eyelashes. Because I think the eyes are such an important part of the face.”

‘I Still Flirt a Lot’

And Tammy Faye Bakker offers this advice: “I don’t care how old you get, I think a woman ought to stay sexy for her husband. She ought to dress sexy and keep herself exciting. I still flirt a lot with my husband at home.”

Interesting counsel, certainly, but in light of recent revelations about the television evangelist’s extramarital sexual encounter and about Tammy Faye Bakker’s treatment for drug dependency, these disclosures in “Christian Wives: Women Behind the Evangelists” (Dolphin/Doubleday) have, its co-author said, evoked “more interest” in a book than even its publisher originally thought would be limited to the so-called Christian market.

Agreed Ellen G. Mastromonaco, Doubleday’s director of advertising and publicity: “There’s no question that a second market has materialized based on the headlines.” Mastromonaco said the publisher “originally expected a big Mother’s Day sale” for the collection of interviews with the wives of seven leading evangelists. “But ever since the headlines started,” Mastromonaco said, “our phones have been ringing off the hook with people whose interest may not be so serious.”

Reached by telephone at home in Fort Wayne, Ind., James Schaffer, co-author of the book with Chicago advertising executive Colleen Todd, stressed that while “recent events with the Bakkers will make evangelists and their wives of more interest to the public, we have no interest in becoming successful from other people’s pain.” He emphasized that “our goal was simply to tell a story,” and described his first book as “definitely biased in the positive sense.”

Still, Schaffer conceded, “this book has always had the voyeurism factor, no doubt about it.”

In addition to Bakker, Schaffer and Todd interviewed Ruth Graham, Evelyn Roberts, Maud Aimee Humbard, Frances Swaggart, Arvella Schuller and Macel Falwell.

Schaffer said that when he and Todd interviewed Tammy Faye Bakker following PTL’s “Jim and Tammy Show” one afternoon last summer in Heritage U.S.A. (near Charlotte, N.C.), they had “no reason to suspect any medical problems or problems in the marriage at that time.”

But, said Schaffer, a former human resources consultant and doctoral candidate in human development at Harvard University, “Anybody who has any knowledge of human behavior could sense that she was under a great deal of stress.”

‘Exaggerated’ Responses

Tammy Bakker’s responses “tended to be exaggerated,” Schaffer said, so that “when she would laugh, when she would cry, any emotional response would be exaggerated.”

During the course of the interview, “I think she cried five times,” Schaffer said, adding that “any kind of question of the slightest personal nature” would move the popular star of the PTL ministry to tears.

Schaffer’s own sense of the situation was that “Tammy has been under intense personal stress for a long time, and I think she is very thin-skinned emotionally.”

While the other six evangelical wives Schaffer and Todd interviewed were “all behind the scenes, on the sidelines for their husbands,” Schaffer said “Tammy has always been the No. 1 attraction” to the PTL audience. “Jim Bakker has always called Tammy his secret weapon,” he said. “I think Tammy paid the price to build PTL up to what it was before all those problems. She really carried the burden. She has internalized all those emotional problems.”

In the Schaffer-Todd interview, Bakker talks about her impoverished childhood in a household where “the family bathroom was an outside privy.” She recalls how she first wore makeup at age 12, the same year she made her dramatic debut in the school production of “Oklahoma!”

Tensions in Marriage

But she also describes how tensions in the marriage drove the Bakkers to separate briefly, and explains that 25 years together have taught the pair to “fight fair.” Bakker’s own prescription for coping with the stress of “PTL and the problems and frustrations of running such a huge corporation” is to shop.

“There’s times I just have to quit thinking and the only way I can quit thinking is by shopping,” Bakker says in the book. “I always say that shopping is cheaper than seeing a psychiatrist. With me if I didn’t have that time, I probably couldn’t live.”

In particular, Bakker likes to buy shoes--”a habit,” write Schaffer and Todd, “she calls one of her secret ‘sins.’ ” She also enjoys purchasing cubic zirconiums, the authors point out. “You can buy a cubic zirconium for 30 bucks and nobody knows,” Bakker told them. “Who is going to know and who dares ask you?”

Schaffer said that during his interviews with Bakker and the other evangelists’ wives, “we really didn’t get into intimate details about their sexual lives and so forth. We really didn’t feel it was appropriate at the time.”

For one thing, said Schaffer, “I just think people don’t understand how difficult it is to get to these people, particularly seven of them. We had to be careful of what we asked, and how far we could push them. They all know each other, and at any point, they could have gotten on the phone and called each other and said, ‘Hey, don’t talk to this guy.’ ”

Yet Schaffer said he found Bakker such an “up” person that he even “discussed with some of Tammy’s associates the idea of doing a follow-up book: ‘Tammy’s Guide to Love and Romance.’ ” Last fall, when he suggested such a book, the response from the Bakker camp was positive, Schaffer said. But then “before all this started blowing up, I think in January or February, they called and said we were going to have to back off for a while. I said why, and they said we just have to back off.”

Author Disappointed

Schaffer said he was disappointed. “It would have been a great book!” he said. “I had the outline done and everything.”

In general, Schaffer and Todd concluded of the evangelists’ spouses they interviewed that “the wives on the whole tend to be stronger, tougher people than their husbands are.” He described these prominent Television-Age ministers as “creative spiritual entrepreneurs.”

In seclusion with her husband in Palm Springs, Tammy Faye Bakker has had no comment on the Schaffer-Todd book or on any of the much-publicized developments regarding her husband and PTL.

“The news I have is that they are fine,” Schaffer said of the Bakkers.